


Learning in Public

by Anonymous



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Adult Losers Club (IT), Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Eddie Kaspbrak's Shorts, Eddie is a bit more high-strung in this one but there's a reason, M/M, Masturbation, Sexual Shame, Social Media, Stan as Richie's manager, YouTuber Eddie AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:47:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23101189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: There are quite a lot of videos, too. Every subject. A lot about his health–a lot of HEALTH UPDATEs, as many as there are HEALTH UPDATE: IT’S NOT CANCERs. He always, Richie notes, makes his videos in his apartment. He has a fanatical obsession with building and painting little model cars, and all of those videos are forty-five minutes and barely watched, comparatively speaking. EDDlESLEFTEYEBROW on twitter, the I in Eddie curiously enough a lower case L, posits that “you're not a real eddietv fan unless you've watched at least 5 of his model car painting videos without skipping through im js.”After barely twenty-four hours in his new apartment, Richie's already made an enemy out of his high-strung next door neighbor. After accidentally committing mail fraud, Richie discovers that said high-strung next door neighbor is also, coincidentally, a high-strung and reasonably successful YouTube star.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 78
Kudos: 260
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

“ _ OH _ , I’M GONNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY,” Richie howls, somewhere into the direction of the broom he’s clutching. “I’M GONNA FEEL THE HEAT WITH SOME-BO-DY–”

He’s significantly louder than Whitney Houston is, blasting from his tinny iphone speakers, from where it’s sat on the table amongst the rest of the junk. Richie Tozier, live and in person, straight from his kitchen, presently a jumble of half unpacked boxes and a table that he stubs his toe on the leg of as he rounds the corner. Richie stumbles and swears, dropping the broom with a loud clatter.

It’s a fresh start. A new apartment–a  _ nicer _ apartment, nicer than his first apartment in LA, the shithole he’d moved into while he was still mostly subsisting off of open mic nights and the occasional freelance copywriting job he’d picked up to keep the lights on. There he’d remained, stubbornly, as he’d climbed his way from the Z-list to where he’s managed to settle somewhere north of the C-list. Clinging to the B-list, some might even say, which he’s pretty pleased with. Normal enough to be allowed to go outside in some state of dishevelment without anyone accusing him of being on coke again, and famous enough to get a free hot dog when he’d been recognized at the Costco food court last month. And, of course, famous enough to make money doing comedy, which means that he’s been able to move. 

His last place had been a shithole. It had also been a  _ familiar  _ shithole–the threadbare couch, the flickering lights in the hallways, the streets that had someone stumbling home drunk round the clock, or occasionally  _ not _ home, the wrong address entirely, which frequently resulted in someone pounding on his door at four AM. But Richie had gotten used to it, sort of. He might have even stayed there forever until the apartment next to his had gotten bedbugs and it became starkly apparent that his nostalgia had its limits. 

So he’d moved. It’s the kind of place that his manager is willing to come to physically, a gated community, high ceilings and gleaming fixtures and an in-unit washer/dryer. It’s not a giant mansion in the Hollywood Hills but Richie’s rubbed elbows with enough professional personalities to know how lonely that gets, even from the outside, such a big place for one person, and right now, it’s very much one person. 

Presently, one person plus Whitney. Richie pushes his armful of glasses (courtesy of Target) into his cupboard with a rattle and takes in another lungful of air. 

“SO WHEN THE NIGHT CALLS,” Richie continues on. “MY LONELY HEART FALLS–oh, shit. Is that right?”

He’s pretty sure. ( _ Hello _ .)  _ I Wanna Dance With Somebody _ , like, say, _ In The Air Tonight _ , or  _ Tiny Dancer _ is one of  _ those _ songs–the kind that comes on at a party and gets everyone going like a rocket, because it’s their  _ song _ , ( _ HELLO.)  _ they  _ love  _ that song, they love it so much they can only remember the one verse, ( _ HELLO!)  _ but boy can they sing it with gusto–

Richie pauses. That thumping, now that he thinks about it, is completely out of beat with the song. And it almost sounds like...well, every few seconds it’s almost like someone is saying…

He stretches to switch his speakers off and catches whoever it is pounding at his door mid-pound, if such a thing exists. He stares at the door, x-acto knife clutched in his fist. Not Stan, surely, the only person who has his new address. Not this late. It’s eleven PM; well past the time at which Stan is probably unwinding with some Wii Sports or settling down to look at pictures of birds on Google Images. 

If this had been in his old neighborhood, it’s almost a certainty he’d let it go–it’s late, and Richie’s seen Dateline. He  _ knows _ of murder. But this isn’t his old neighborhood–it’s a gated apartment complex, and not that rich people can’t and don’t frequently commit both murder and crimes, but he’s pretty sure that it would never fly with the Housing Association, and getting approved had been such a  _ pain _ , and–

–Richie will unpack that later. For now, he drops the x-acto knife and heads for the door. He has to fiddle with the lock and chain for a second–a lot more complicated that his old deadbolt, actually, and it’s a long several seconds before he manages to have any success. 

“Are you out of your fucking  _ mind _ ,” a voice barks out, as soon as the door is barely cracked, before Richie can even get a good look at what the source of the voice is. 

And when he gets a good look at it,  _ him  _ as it turns out, it’s five foot something’s worth of quivering fury. The man at his doorstep is dressed for bed, in shorts, loose UNIVERSITY OF MAINE t-shirt–and, mysteriously, expensive-looking loafers. He has dark hair, tousled from sleep, and the biggest eyes Richie has ever seen on any living being outside of Puss in Boots from the second Shrek film.

Richie takes that in. 

“Huh?”

“Do you  _ know _ ,” the man hisses, reaching up like he’s going to karate chop Richie. “What  _ time it is _ .”

The karate chop lands in the air just shy of his chest. Richie blinks, stupidly. “What?”

It’s the wrong thing to say, as it turns out. The guy practically leaps to start pacing, gesturing as he talks. “Is that all you know how to say? Huh? What? How? Who? It’s eleven PM. You’ve been going at it for  _ forty-five minutes _ . Some of us,” he snaps, coming to a halt again in front of him, shoulders up, up, up with tension. “Are trying. To Sleep.”

“Oh.” Richie scratches at the back of neck. “Uh, sorry, dude. I just moved in, I didn’t realize that the walls were so thin.”

“The walls aren’t thin.” The man’s voice drops low, almost pleasant, apart from the unspoken  _ You stupid motherfucker. _ “The walls are normal walls. You’ve just been  _ screaming _ .”

“I was singing,” Richie says, folding his arms, affronted. “Actually. You don’t like Whitney Houston? Everyone likes that song.” He doesn’t look like he likes Whitney Houston. He looks like he wants to punch him in the face, actually, which circles back to the whole rich people and violence thing. He’d never gotten punched in the face  _ once _ at his old apartment, except that he’d gotten too high and unwisely coaxed Stan (in a similar state of inebriation) into doing it in the interest of sobering him up. 

But the guy hasn’t answered him yet, even with a  _ fuck you _ , and to Richie’s delight, he actually seems as though he’s mulling over his question. “I like Phil Collins,” he says finally. A little icily, like  _ that’s _ the fuck-you, and maybe it is, because that’s what he turns and stalks back to his apartment on, delivering the rest of it over his shoulder. “I would like you to not sing again. Thank you. Goodnight.”

“Does this mean I’m not going to Hollywood?” Richie calls after him, but the guy’s already wrenched the door open to the apartment next to Richie’s and shut it behind him with a slam, and, well. There’s his next door neighbor. Not the greatest introduction. 

When Richie takes a step back inside and shuts the door, he pauses, cocking his head, to see if he can hear the signs of life from within next door–footsteps, or maybe for the guy to run the tap, or something, but he doesn’t hear anything, so. Maybe the walls  _ are _ normal, like he’d said. 

He shuts off the speakers entirely, thinks about his neighbor, wonders who he is. Rich enough to afford to live here, obviously, which means that he’s some variety of loaded. Probably not a trust fund baby–Richie doesn’t get that sense from him–although who knows, really. Maybe some sort of marketing exec, or probably finance, now that he thinks about it. There are plenty of both in LA, but this guy seems far too uptight to work in marketing. 

Maybe he’s a dogwalker, Richie thinks as he returns to his cluttered table. He thinks of the guy next door stumbling after a collection of yappy little dogs, in the shorts he’d seen him in. Maybe he’s the world’s snobbiest barista, at some pretentious roastery, La Colombe, or something. Maybe he’s a pageant coach. Maybe he’s a politician. 

But it’s not like it really makes a difference either way, or like Richie’s ever really going to find out, after tonight. It appears that anything approaching friendship is beyond them, which is actually fine. He didn't move into this fancy new apartment in order to make friends–he’d moved so that people would stop stealing his mail. He has plenty of friends already. Friends who like him, and friends who will tolerate at least two full songs’ worth of shitty Whitney Houston renditions from him before he’s cut off. 

At least at home, he’ll have to cut down on the singing, though, probably, which is too bad–at least the singing with that much gusto. Richie can hear the faint  _ thump thump thump  _ of feet next door now, soft and muted.

It’s not an ominous start here, Richie decides, because he’s willing it to be so. It’s a funny sort of start, here, actually, which bodes well. He thinks. He hopes. 

_ When I'm feeling blue _ , Richie whisper-sings, in a hush, as he reaches to carefully unwrap a piece of china.  _ All I have to do is take a look at you… _

***

He runs into the guy a few times afterwards, but it’s always in passing, always as he’s darting out the front door with a curt  _ excuse me _ as Richie comes in, or as he’s exiting the gym hastily when Richie’s finally worked up the nerve to go down and look at the weights and think about how much he’d very much like to not lift them. Truthfully, Richie can’t tell if the guy is embarrassed at his own behavior or still furious with Richie for his solo concert, but enough time passes so that their altercation recedes into the fringes of his memory, replaced by the fresh encounters he’s had with the building’s more amicable residents; the seventy-year-old actress with a low and gravelly voice who’d barked out a laugh when Richie had done an impression of her without thinking of him, Richie’s neighbor from across the hall whose formerly surly fourteen-year-old had asked shyly if she could take a picture with him. 

And so the little angry man in the shorts who had verbally attacked him on his first night becomes a funny but faint memory, enough to keep him from singing again, but not much beyond that. Quickly, he’s got something else to focus on too, by coincidence: how quickly the moving process becomes disrupted by a writing deadline, a curveball that Stan had tossed him, a spec script for a network. It means that he’s focused, and neurotic, and quiet; Whitney Houston, as it turns out, had just been a guest passing through. 

Richie quarantines himself. He holes up in his fancy new half-unpacked apartment and writes, and writes, and writes. He orders takeout, and he doesn’t shower until he can’t stand it anymore. It’s a black comedy–a pilot about an executive assistant at a film company who frames his boss for murder in an effort to get promoted–and, the more he writes it, the more it looks as though it’s going to be pretty good. 

And on a whim, he writes in a manager at the same company, dark-haired and frantic, fanatic about Phil Collins. It’s crazy, probably, but Richie’s angry next door neighbor represents himself in his memory, although there’s a significant degree of invention necessary, because Richie doesn’t know a single fucking thing about this guy beyond the the shallow, baseline details, like he’s short, and he carries all his tension in his shoulders. Willing to follow along with an absurdity long enough to disclose that he likes Phil Collins, even when he’s furious. But that’s about it, really, which is fine–he’s a minor character, anyway. Richie gives him a handful of lines, calls him Peter, and forgets where he’d pilfered him from, until he goes to check his mail the next Tuesday, in the state-of-the-art mailroom in which Richie has to peck in T-O-Z-I-E-R to the central panel at least fourteen times to the central display in order for his locker to pop open, because god forbid someone get their mail by turning a key once, and finds a package that isn’t for him. 

Or–he’s pretty sure it isn’t from him. It’s heavy, and it’s from YouTube–he can see it in the embossed return address. There on the front is 654, which is his apartment number. His first thought is that he  _ had _ done a spectacularly shitty piece of content for the official YouTube channel about a month ago, as he faintly remembers; they’d wanted him to go through the motions of getting ready in the morning without having the forethought to sense that ‘I roll out of bed and remember to brush my teeth, usually’ would result in a grand total of three seconds of content–maybe ten if he spoke too slowly. 

So it’s not out of the question that he’d be receiving something from them, but whatever it is, it’s  _ heavy _ . Richie wonders if it’s a cease and desist. But even if it’s got his apartment on it, and it’s something that reasonably would fit well within the Richie Tozier cinematic universe of horrible PR, it doesn’t have his name on it. Instead, it reads: ATTN:  _ EDWARD KASPBRAK.  _

Richie mulls that over as he heads back up to his apartment. Edward Kaspbrak. The name is entirely foreign to him, but he wonders if it’s Stan’s assistant. The new one. It wouldn’t have been the first time that something for him had been delivered to his management’s address, or vice versa–thankfully Richie has both no shame to go along with his late-night Amazon habits and a manager with the patience of a saint. 

He misses Stan’s old assistant, truthfully, he thinks as he shoulders open the door. Her name had been Gretchen, and she’d looked like the sort of cheerleader who’d bullied him in school–which is, Richie’s pretty sure, some sort of fulfillment of the American dream. The act of going from being bullied by a hot cheerleader in high school to paying a hot (former) cheerleader to help Stan bully him. Arthur Miller, eat your heart out. 

But the age of Gretchen has passed, since she’s moved on to focusing her energies on becoming an Instagram influencer; now it’s a guy, and Richie is pretty sure his name begins with an E. He’s so  _ pretty sure _ of it, in fact, that he’s midway through opening the package when he remembers that oh, it’s definitely Rob something, so he’d been entirely off the mark, apparently. Whoops. But since he’s gone halfway he might as well finish, and–

Richie squints. It’s a plaque; he’s got it backwards but it’s gleaming and gold. He hasn’t won an award recently that he’s aware of–and isn’t that the height of douchebaggery, to be unaware of an award that he might or might not have won. But as he turns it over to its face, it’s not his name that he sees. 

“Presented to EDDIETV,” Richie mumbles, squinting at it. “For passing 1,000,000 subscribers.”

Well, fuck. 

_ Now _ he’s officially a Hollywood douchebag; opening up someone else’ mail because he’d assumed, in his egoism, that  _ naturally _ it ought to be his, that YouTube wouldn’t be sending anyone else some sort of award, all because that shitty video in which he’d dutifully and incorrectly applied a moisturizer that he supposedly swore by for fifteen minutes before running out of things to do.  _ That _ piece of hot garbage had clearly popped up on their radar enough to ensure that they’d send him a fuck-off big gold plaque for. 

But it had been addressed to him, right? Richie frowns, craning his neck to peer at the address on the package. 654, that’s definitely his apartment, and it says it right there,  _ 654A _ , and–

Well. Actually. 

Maybe, Richie thinks with a dawning sense of horror. Maybe not.  _ 654A.  _

Richie gets up hastily, setting down the plaque and scrambling to get to the door. He yanks it open. He’s 654A, right? Definitely. He’s not stupid enough to forget something like that, where he  _ lives _ , he’s–

654B stares him back in the face, and with a sinking feeling–why not, his whole life is a fucking joke–Richie steps out into the hallway and looks over to Phil Collins guy’s door with an sense of resignation. 

654A, he reads, so. There’s that. 

***

The plan is as follows: first, carefully repack the plaque in all of its packaging. It’s harder than it looks; he has to scrub the fingerprints from its gleaming front, rewrap it in the bubble wrap, carefully, do some minor surgery on the shipping label he’d ripped. But twenty minutes later, he’s done, and it looks more or less like the package is entirely unopened. 

Which leaves the next step of the plan, the one he’d been more or less dreading. Dutifully, with package in hand, he shuffles out of his apartment and heads down the hallway to 654A, and knocks, before he can stop himself. 

A minute passes, and nothing happens. Then another minute, and Richie can hear the faint sounds (the walls  _ are  _ thin, really, Richie thinks mutinously) of someone padding over to come to the door. Another pause, like someone’s looking through the peephole, and then the door opens, and well–there he is. 

He’s just come from someplace formal, clearly. He’s in a suit and tie, minus the jacket; the sleeves are neatly rolled up to his forearms. He looks tired, and wary, and his hair is sticking up a little bit. Richie has to resist the bizarre impulse to reach out and smooth it. 

“Hi,” the guy–Eddie–says, eyeing him warily, like he might burst into song at any second. 

“Hallo,” Richie says, in a funny sort of way, and stares like an idiot until he remembers why he’s there. “I, uh. They misdelivered a package to my apartment, I think it’s–it’s yours?”

“Oh.” Eddie blinks; his eyes fall on the package in Richie’s hands. Comprehension blooms across his face. Clearly, Richie thinks, he’d been expecting this. “ _ Oh _ . Give it here.” Richie does. Eddie peers at the package, and then looks back at Richie, this time with a touch more suspicion. “It has the right address on it,” Eddie says, like this is some sort of conspiracy. He doesn’t, however, comment on the fact that it’s been opened, if he can pick up on that, and that’s a relief. 

“Weird, huh?” Richie asks, scratching at the back of his neck. “Anyway. Look, I wanted to say–maybe we should have a fresh start here? I’m Richie.”

“I know,” Eddie says, distractedly, as he gives the package a closer once-over. “I saw you on Netflix.”

Richie waits. Normally, that's when people start to gush, because why bring up Netflix at all if he's not going to say anything positive about it, but as the seconds tick by, it becomes clear that apparently that's all Eddie has. “Oh. Well–cool,” Richie offers. “Good job.” 

Eddie pauses, and looks back up at Richie with a frown. “You're not really very funny,” he says, very seriously. “Like, I think you could be funny, but the dick jokes, like, the shit about your girlfriend, it’s  _ juvenile, _ man, you’re like...what, forty?’”

“I could be a youthful sixty, or an elderly twenty-five,” Richie points out. “I have an air of mystery about me.”

_ No you don’t _ , the look that Eddie gives him says, which is probably fair, as it’s already been well established that Richie is loud and obvious in nearly every way that counts. “You’re like twenty years past dick jokes. Is my point.”

“Oh, thanks,” Richie says, a little bewildered, because–alright, he isn't full of himself, necessarily, but this isn't usually how this goes. There are rules. “I've been thinking about quitting the comedy thing and becoming a singer, actually. I mean, I'll need to like, really get my nose to the grindstone and practice, but I think I’ve  _ got  _ something–”

Eddie’s affixed him with such a look of horror, (and  _ man _ , his eyes are cartoonishly huge) that Richie has to put him out of his misery. He breaks into a laugh. 

“I'm messing with you, dude. I can't sing. I  _ can _ tell jokes, though, so fuck you. Like, they pay me, and everything. 

You can tell jokes,” Eddie relents. “Sometimes. I liked your story about the treehouse you had when you were a kid. But, like–overall, it needs work.”

“Well, noted,” Richie says dryly, and Eddie nods, seriously, like he feels like he's done Richie a solid, delivering a critique. He sticks his hand out. 

“I'm Eddie,” he says. Richie shakes.  _ I know, _ he wants to say, or  _ congrats on the one million subscribers _ .

“It's nice to. Uh. Not meet you, obviously, but it's nice to know your name.” 

Eddie gives him a weird look. His hands are small, Richie notes, as he releases him. “I’m Richie,” he offers, and Eddie already knows that, obviously, but he does Richie the decency of refraining from pointing that out.

“Nice to meet you too, Richie,” Eddie tells him, and Richie might be reading into things, but he sort of sounds like he means it, before he continues on. “Recycling goes out on Saturdays. You keep putting it out on Thursdays.” And with that, he disappears back into his apartment.

***

Richie is a masterful procrastinator, but really, this barely taps into his skillset; he’s on deadline, and his weird, kind of hot neighbor, who’d screamed at him the first time he’d met him, is apparently some kind of online sensation. Richie doesn’t know much about Youtube, beyond what his publicist tells him, but he’s pretty sure a million is a lot. Richie has like, barely two million, and he’s been thrust into the public’s faces relentlessly over the course of the past three years’ worth of bit parts in dramedies and stand-up specials. 

So once he’s back in his apartment, Richie bypasses his study and heads directly to his bedroom and his laptop. On Youtube, he’s confronted by the search bar. He types in EDDIETV, and pauses. 

This is a violation of privacy, probably, he thinks, as the guilt starts to creep in. Isn’t it? He’d gotten this from his mail–the mail that he’d  _ opened _ . That’s textbook creepy. But Eddie’s a public figure, isn’t he? One million subscribers isn’t something to sneeze at. There’s a twitter account dedicated to Richie’s novelty t-shirts. All  _ he’s _ doing is looking up what’s presumably there for public consumption.

He hits enter before he can stop himself. 

Almost instantaneously, little thumbnails of his neighbor flood his screen. Eddie sat in front of his computer with a frown; Eddie carefully building some sort of model car. Eddie looking grimly at a collection of packaged snacks. Eddie cooking something, relaxed, like Richie’s never seen him. Eddie tying his tie. 

And then, curiously enough, there are people who  _ aren’t _ Eddie, posing for thumbnails with an incredulous expression, usually with smaller Eddies in smaller thumbnails within, with titles like WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT EDDIETV, and IS EDDIETV FOR REAL? Or–curiously enough–EDDIETV EXPOSED. 

And Richie is  _ enthralled _ , although this definitely feels like some kind of violation of privacy now. He shouldn’t be seeing Eddie put little model cars together, or Eddie–inexplicably–making his bed, but he wants to, like if he has a little glass window built into the wall between their respective apartments; if such a thing existed, Richie couldn’t  _ not _ peer through it, feasibly. He clicks on his channel name. 

EDDIETV, Richie reads, in the header, but before he can continue–

“ _ Alright _ ,” Eddie says, and Richie jumps, startled, but it’s just the video autoplaying. God, he could’ve had a heart attack. Hastily, he fumbles for his headphones; the last thing he wants is for Eddie to hear his own voice through the (apparently thin) walls. 

Eddie peers at the camera; next to him is a bowl with little slips of paper. He’s dressed neatly, but far more casually than Richie’s ever seen him–a Springsteen t-shirt, from what he can see, a little big on him, hanging loose down his neck. 

“ _ You guys wanted to ask me questions, so here we are. I didn’t read them yet, so this is like, a total surprise for me, so here we go–”  _ Eddie leans in closer, peering at his monitor, where presumably the questions live. “ _ What’s your skincare routine? Products, etc?’ _ ”

A little bubble with the comment pops up on the right hand corner of the screen; it’s been asked by bumblebee384. Eddie frowns, almost comically displeased by the question, like he’s being asked if he believes in god. 

_ “Okay. Listen. I know half of you are, like fourteen years old–and don’t fucking come at me for that, I know you are, I can see the viewership statistics right now, and that’s not, like, a diss, it’s just the reality of the situation, it’s just–you’re thirteen years old and you haven’t learned the concept of fiscal responsibility. Here’s the thing.” _

At this point, Eddie’s gotten up from his desk, and he’s pacing as he talks, in front of the monitor, and Richie can see the Eddie he’s been encountering now, in how his shoulders go tense at the concept of fiscal responsibility. 

“ _ The skincare industry is a scam, it’s like–do you know how much people spend on this shit? It’s bottles of toner the size of my thumb for like, fifty dollars, and you can’t–you shouldn’t be willing to blindly follow whatever whichever youtube star is shilling. Put your money in a bank account. Invest responsibly. When you’re retiring, are you going to be like, wow, thank god I spent five thousand dollars on a serum that didn’t do shit over the course of ten years!” _

He’s pretty sure that Eddie is yelling at him.  _ That’s _ what’s gotten him to a million subscribers? People go to Youtube to get yelled at? Maybe, Richie thinks, it’s some sort of masochism thing. 

“ _ My skin is normal, by the way,”  _ Eddie continues, a little more calmly. _ “And I’m also forty, so obviously most of my recommendations will be useless for you. I take Vitamin E, I use a moisturizer at night, and I use sunscreen during the day, and that’s what’s the most important. Google melanoma. Like, google image it. Click on it and make it big. Sunscreen is a big fucking deal, I’m telling you, that’s my forty year old wisdom that you should be following, and–I wear it year round, like you ought to. That’s a mistake that people make. Even if it’s not sunny out, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes people only wear it to the beach, which is like, peak fucking insanity...” _

He’s gotten himself worked up again. Richie can’t remember the last time he’d worn sunscreen. He’d gone to the beach, last summer, something that didn’t quite fall within his normal habits, and he’d been red like a lobster the next morning. He’s not fourteen, though; he’s forty, like Eddie is, so apparently, he ought to know better.

He assumes that Eddie has a  _ thing _ in particular about sunscreen until the next few questions go the same way; every other topic launches Eddie into an angry spiel, and twice, he tells whoever’s posed the question to go fuck themselves. Once, he tells the question poser to log off of their computer, to pick it up, and to throw it into the garbage. As it turns out, he has an opinion on a number of issues, ranging from the foreign vs American-made car debate (“an exercise in diverting the responsibility you have to do specific stat-based research on a multi-thousand-dollar purchase”) to the correct pronunciation of ‘gif’ (“anyone who says jif is a pedantic asshole who ought to isolate themselves from society) to essential oils (“bullshit”). 

It’s remarkable, honestly, that all that anger’s managed to fit itself into such a compact package. Richie scrolls down to look through the comments, just out of curiosity. He’s not an expert on Youtube, but he knows how the comments always go; he’d once delivered an impassioned plea for donations to one cause or another and the top rated comment had been someone wondering  _ Y your head so godam square.  _

So–given the fact that Eddie’s spent the last twenty minutes or so ridiculing the commentariot, Richie expects nothing short of a crucifixion. But to his bewilderment, that’s not what it is; in fact, as Richie reads through him, it becomes apparent that they’re  _ delighted _ by Eddie’s rancor. 

_ petition for eddie to come to vidcon so he can bully me in person _

_ Reaction gif @ :34  _

_ I wish eddie narrated my life lol _

_ eddie take a nap challenge 2k20 _

“What the fuck,” Richie mutters, half annoyed, half amused. He’d been  _ nice _ to them, and they’d said that he had a head like a lego brick. What gives? Richie scrolls back up, curious to see what else Eddie has in him to be furious about for the twenty minutes left in the video, until–

–until his eyes fall on the suggested video in the corner, and, uh. Well. 

MY NEIGHBOR IS AN ASSHOLE AND I WILL KILL HIM, Richie reads, and stares. In the thumbnail, Eddie is wearing the shorts and t-shirt he’d been wearing when he’d confronted him that first time; he stands tensely in what appears to be his bedroom, barefoot, looking to the side at the wall. 

This is definitely an invasion of privacy now, Richie thinks, dragging his mouse to hover over the video.  _ However _ , it’s also a matter of personal safety. What if he’s the neighbor Eddie’s going to kill? He ought to know. Tactically speaking, anyway. 

Guiltily, Richie clicks. 

In the video, Eddie’s sprawled on what looks like his bed, which–of course–is made neatly, with military precision. His face is pinched in the way that it gets when he’s particularly displeased with something, and as the seconds tick by, it becomes clear, obviously, what it is. 

_ “Do you fucking hear that?” _

Eddie pauses, cocking his head, and then–horror floods through Richie’s veins as he abruptly fucking hears that. He recognizes the sound of his own voice, pitchy and off-key, delivering an impassioned rendition of  _ Somebody Who Loves Me _ . He’s pretty sure it’s him, anyway. Feasibly, it could also be some sort of animal being tortured, but Richie’s got 70/30 odds it’s his attempt at Whitney Houston from the night that he’d moved in. 

“ _ Look at this. Look at this,”  _ Eddie hisses, and picks up the camera, flipping it around so that he can zoom in on the clock on the wall. “ _ Ten thirty pm and this jackass thinks to himself, hey, now seems like precisely the time at which everyone in this whole goddamn apartment complex needs to hear my special performance. _ ”

Richie can see the rest of his bedroom now; it’s relatively spartan, decorated conservatively, in muted blues and greens, but at the same time, Richie gets the sense that the guy has expensive taste. Boring and expensive, which is fitting, if he works in finance, somewhere. Except for a few framed comic books on the walls–it’s Eddie’s only concession to childishness, apparently, although from the quick glimpse Richie gets, he’s pretty sure that the issues he has up are worth something. 

Eddie continues through the apartment as he talks, and now he’s in the room from the thumbnail. The layout is similar to that of Richie’s own; a little less spacious, maybe, because Richie has a corner unit. The differences beyond that are stark. Richie’s already looks like a bomb went off within it, even if he’s just moved in, and mysteriously, after the bomb had gone off, someone’s gone through to carefully place a collection of the world’s ugliest and most useless knickknacks throughout the place.

Eddie’s apartment, meanwhile, barely looks lived in. Richie can catch a glimpse of a closet full of suits, neatly organized by color; a bathroom that looks straight out of a luxury hotel. There’s the most stuff in his kitchen, it looks like–little bottles of spices in stacks, and at least four or five different blenders. 

_ “I’m going to fucking lose it,” _ Eddie continues on. He sets the camera down with a clatter on the dining room table and pauses, head cocked. Richie winces; in this room, his caterwauling is even more audible. _ “I was supposed to be in bed thirty minutes ago–I have to jog tomorrow, and if I don’t get my eight hours, you all know I lose my fucking mind, and I have to get up at seven, and it takes half an hour to go to sleep, on average, which means that I’ll have barely any time to stretch, which is, like. Absolute insanity.” _

Eddie talks like the words in his mouth are crowded, scrambling to get out, one toeing at the heels of the next. He gestures dramatically, spine ramrod-stiff as he speaks. 

Richie isn’t the self-conscious type, not  _ generally _ , but he’d really assumed that the walls were thick enough that his singing would go unnoticed. He knows he can’t sing–it’s fine, he has plenty of other talents–he just likes to do it anyway. 

As Eddie’s made clear, he’d rather he wouldn’t. 

_ “I saw him when I got back from work today.”  _ Richie blinks. He doesn’t remember that, but he’d been dealing with the moving van, and his stuff, all of the last fifteen years of his life packed away in a U-Haul, and apparently his small and angry neighbor had escaped his notice entirely. _ He looked like a fucking–you know, some LA douchebag, but I thought to myself, hey Eddie, maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Maybe he’s a good guy. You hated the last guy, maybe you ought to, like, manifest having a good neighbor for once in your fucking life. Well guess the fuck what. Fate has fucked me once again. I traded the asshole who smoked pot from like, nine to two am for the asshole who thinks that ten-thirty PM is the appropriate time to inflict your awful singing onto the world at large. _ ”

Richie pauses, peers at himself in the mirror. He’s not sure what LA douchebag means, precisely, or if he does, indeed, look like one. He’s wearing a threadbare shirt with Garfield the cat on it–he’d found it in the $1 bin at the thrift store. Garfield stares back at him reproachfully. 

“Hey,” Richie mutters. “I lived with Stan for  _ two years _ . He never said shit about my singing, and he was in the same apartment as me.”

Garfield's silence is deafening.

_ “Maybe I should say something. _ ” __

Richie’s focus returns to Eddie on the screen, and he watches as Eddie does a few quick little paces in front of the door, hands curled into fists at his sides, like he’s trying to psych himself up. Richie is fully aware that it’s he himself that’s going to be yelled at, but–well, it’s actually a little bit cute. 

_“I’m going to say something_ ,” Eddie says, decisively. “ _Back in a few._ ”

Eddie moves towards the door, and there’s a jump-cut. 

Eddie is at his desk, now, the same place that he’d filmed the Q&A that Richie had watched before. He looks triumphant. For dramatic effect, he’s lapsed into silence, and that’s what it is: silence. Richie’s sumptuous tones are absent. 

_ “Do you hear that? I don’t. You should’ve seen him, he was like–he totally didn’t think anyone was going to call him on his shit. I was like, listen, man, it’s the middle of the fucking night, if you don’t shut the fuck up, I will make your life a living hell. Do not fuck with me. And he was like– _ ”

“That’s not what happened,” Richie mumbles, a little bewildered, and as though he’s just heard him, Eddie onscreen sighs, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck. 

_ “I mean, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, probably, I guess,”  _ he admits. “ _ But I mean, he stopped. Total LA douchebag, though, I was right, he was like–tall, those fucking hipster glasses, and the shirt, you should’ve seen it, it was like, it would cause car accidents. It’s a road hazard The colors. I think I’m getting a migraine.” _

Eddie scrubs at his face; suddenly, he looks very tired. 

“ _ This is a boring fucking video, huh. You’re all going to give me shit in the comments. Maybe you ought to. Maybe I should–here.” _

Eddie stretches to reach for something behind the camera, and comes up with a little packet that crinkles in his hand. He holds it up to the camera; it looks like fruit gummies in the shape of fish, dusted with sugar. 

_ “So you’re not up my ass about skipping these last time because I thought they looked gross. Why the fuck were you all so pissed about that, and not, like. Global warming. These are German, I think–I think they’re licorice.” _

He breaks open the package with a frown, shakes out a few onto his palm, which he holds out dutifully close to the lens. Just as they’d appeared a few minutes earlier, they’re fish-shaped fruit snacks. Licorice snacks, apparently. 

_ “These smell disgusting,” _ Eddie mutters, drawing his hand close to his face. “ _ But maybe they’re good.” _

He pops one into his mouth and chews, pausing to contemplate the taste for a second or so. 

“ _These are_ _ gross _ ,” Eddie hisses, alarmed, betrayed, furious, and Richie, without thinking about it much, laughs. “ _They’re fucking salty–what the_ _ fuck _ _–no, I gotta swallow it. I’m gonna swallow it_.”

It’s a tremendous agony, to do it, from Richie’s vantage point. Eddie nearly retches; he screws his face up; he swallows, finally, hands clutching at the desk like he fears that he’ll be swept away. Richie’s never seen anyone go through the seven stages of grief in order to eat a fruit snack. 

And then, curiously, Eddie lapses into silence, like he’s mulling something over. 

“ _Six out of ten_ ,” he says, finally, and reaches over to turn the camera off. And that’s the end of the video.

Richie realizes, with a half smile, that he sort of likes him. 

***

Eddie, as it turns out, is a convenient distraction. There are plenty of puzzles that surround him that Richie can struggle to work out, rather than do his writing–he’s always around, on Youtube, or occasionally, in person. Richie works out his schedule, just out of curiosity, and it’s clear that Eddie does work–or at least he goes somewhere Monday through Friday, 9am to 7:30pm. It’s a  _ lot _ of work, in fact, and Richie has to wonder when he has time to make all of his YouTube videos. 

Because there are quite a lot of those, too. Every subject. A lot about his health–a lot of HEALTH UPDATEs, as many as there are HEALTH UPDATE: IT’S NOT CANCERs. He always, Richie notes, makes his videos in his apartment. He has a fanatical obsession with building and painting little model cars, and all of those videos are forty-five minutes and barely watched, comparatively speaking. EDDlESLEFTEYEBROW on twitter, the I in eddie curiously enough a lower case L, posits that “you're not a real eddietv fan unless you've watched at least 5 of his model car painting videos without skipping through im js”

Because that's the thing. Richie genuinely can't tell if there's something ironic in the way Eddie’s fans take pleasure in the sheer variety of the subject matter that his videos concern themselves with, from his HOW TO COOK QUINOA AND WHAT IS IT videos to IT’S NOT A FANNY PACK ITS A JOGGING BELT YOU ASSHOLES. The age range, as far as Richie can tell, spans wide–most of them seem like classic 18-24s, but there are some outside of it too. 

On Saturdays, Eddie disappears somewhere for much of the afternoon. On Sundays, Eddie works out at the gym, frantically. Richie hasn't set foot in the gym since his first halfhearted effort–he's pretty sure he'd burst into flames, like a vampire in church. But it's on his way in from outside, and he sees Eddie there, occasionally, usually on the treadmill. 

It's there that Richie runs into Eddie three weeks after he’d first stumbled across his youtube channel, and for the first time since Richie had run into Phil Hartman on a family vacation to New York when he’d been younger it feels like he’s just run into a celebrity. Eddie looks like he’d worked himself to the point of exhaustion. His gray t-shirt sticks to his chest, and his hair has gone a little curly with sweat, and Richie has to think, for the first time about a person,  _ I just watched you LIVING IN [YOUR] BATHROOM FOR 24 HRS _ . 

“Oh,” Eddie says, surprised. “Hello.”

“Hi!” Richie’s arms are full of groceries, and when Eddie says  _ hello _ , he nearly drops them. 

“Here,” Eddie says, hastily reaching out to cradle the bag. “Let me–let me help.”

“I’m good!” Richie protests. “I mean, I got it–”

“You don’t got it. You almost dropped it, and there are eggs in here,” Eddie explains to him, patiently, as he peers into the bag. “And–dude. Lunchables? Do you have a kid?”

“No kids,” Richie says. Eddie’s set off down the hallway–he walks quickly, for someone with comparatively shorter legs–and Richie hastens to keep up with him. “Just me. I’m the kid.”

Eddie makes a face. “You’re too old for Lunchables.”

“Well, they didn’t, like, reverse card me when I bought them, so I’m pretty sure I’m good.”

Richie’s quip has gone unnoticed; his grocery bag has taken up Eddie’s attention entirely, which is embarrassing. He’s pretty sure that he’s got not one but  _ two _ copies of  _ People Magazine _ in there. 

“And–what the fuck else is in here,” Eddie continues. “Why are there like, fourteen packets of Peanut M&Ms?”

“What is this, some kind of grocery audit?”

“Did you, like, go on one of those shows where you had five minutes to run and grab whatever you want for free? Because that’s the only explanation I have for what’s in this bag.”

Eddie takes the stairs two at a time, and matter-of-factly, too; it doesn’t make him breathless like it would Richie, who has to hasten to keep up with him, even if his legs have to be at least twice as long. 

“Peanut M&Ms have peanuts in them. They’re healthy.” The look that Eddie gives him is like one that he might have given a man who’d just casually mentioned that the world was flat, actually. 

“Do you really believe that? Do you hear what you’re saying? It’s important to be honest with yourself–oh.” He fishes out a bunch of bananas, and he sounds  _ delighted _ when he continues on. “Bananas! Those are a good choice, actually, for breakfast.”

Richie doesn’t have the heart to make the obvious joke, not when he’s risen in Eddie’s esteem now by way of banana purchase. He wonders why he works, if he’s reasonably successful with Youtube, but maybe he’s biased. Richie would rather chew his own arm off than go sit in any office for eight hours a day, which is why he’s dragged his feet on writing this pilot so much; if he has a script to write, it makes sense that he’s holed up in his bedroom, reruns of  _ Cheers _ in the background. It also makes sense that he’s not out on the road. Maybe Stan had been right when he’d told him, bluntly, that all of this outlining sounded like laziness. 

He still has two months, though. That’s time. They’ve made it up the stairs and down the hallway, and finally, they come to a halt in front of Richie’s doorway. 

“Thanks,” Richie says, stretching an arm out to take the bag of groceries. “Do you, uh. Do you want some peanut M&Ms?”

Eddie draws his eyebrows together, mouth thinning in a way that very much signals what the answer will be–until suddenly, it looks like he’s reconsidering. “Well, okay,” Eddie says, after a hesitation, and strangely enough, Richie is delighted. 

He rummages through the bag until he can come up with a packet and passes it off to Eddie, like an offering to some sort of mercurial, shorts-wearing god. Eddie flips it over to study the ingredients, his neck bent in concentration. “So does this mean I can sing again?”   


“No,” Eddie says absently. “I don’t think you should ever do that again.”

Richie clutches at his heart, feigning a great hurt. “Ever?” 

“For the rest of your life,” Eddie says gravely, without missing a beat, and turns and shuts the door. A joke, it takes Richie a second to realize–and he laughs. 


	2. 2

An age ago, when Richie had been touring apartments and pretending to understand what the appeal of a backsplash was, he can remember that one of the big selling points of this place had been the amenities. The fully equipped gym, with its state-of-the-art machines; the pool out back, with the jacuzzi. The lounge with the pool table. The dog run. 

Richie’s cognizant of the fact that that’s all good stuff, obviously. He’d had a vague ambition of lifting a weight or two, once, even. But he’s pretty sure that he doesn’t own a swimsuit, and he’s _also_ pretty sure that he doesn’t own a dog. He likes pool, but mostly just when he’s drunk, and never when he’s alone. So he’s ignored them, mostly, which is fine–there are plenty of places he can go to have fun, _outside_ of the apartment complex he’s tucked himself away in in order to write this fucking screenplay, and that’s probably ideal–it’s a good thing, Stan tells him, to venture out in society, like he fucking knows. 

They put the gym right at the front of the building, with enormous, gleaming glass windows, floor to ceiling, overlooking the public park across the way. Richie feels a little bad every time he passes it, because he’s forty, and they let him go on TV sometimes, which means that (by law) he ought to be in there doing cardio or some other sort of fitness bullshit, and he’s never been. Thought about it plenty, though, which he’s pretty sure technically ought to count for something. 

He’s coming in from an early morning meeting when he sees Eddie there. It’s nice out, unseasonably warm (that’s global warming!) without being _too_ warm, and bright, the sun streaming in through the windows. Bizarrely, Eddie’s the only one in there, on the treadmill–it’s what he favors, Richie’s noticed, not that he’s been _noticing_. Not any more than would be totally normal. Richie has no intention of making this weird–any weirder than it already is, anyway, with the videos, and with the mail fraud, and the singing. Eddie has discipline, and he works out regularly there in the gym, and sometimes Richie sees him there on the treadmill, that’s all. Usually early in the morning, which means that Richie usually misses him, given his standing appointment with his bed. 

As he watches now, he sees Eddie stumble, nearly tripping over his own feet. It nearly sends him to the ground–as places to trip go, a treadmill, as it turns out, isn’t ideal–but he more or less recovers, weaving off of the treadmill to steady himself with a palm flat against the wall. He ducks his head like he’s dizzy, still wobbly on his feet, and–

–Richie shoulders open the door without thinking, because god, he’s not going to stand there and watch him have a heart attack because he doesn’t want to make things weird. There’s a limit to keeping it to good, clean, permissible heterosocial interaction between two men, and he’s pretty sure that letting someone keel over rather than break the law of never looking at another man in a gym is pushing it to its extreme. “Hey,” he calls. “Are you–”

And then it hits him, the heat. It’s _sweltering_ in the gym. It might be temperate outside, but the sun through the glass windows has turned the place to a sauna; Richie’s reminded of the one time, in a profound act of deceit and betrayal, that Bev had tricked him and Bill into taking a hot yoga class. He’d lasted halfway through the class before ducking out to ‘take a call,’ and Bill–god help him–had soldiered on through it with a grim determination before having to duck out to vomit in the lobby forty-five minutes in. 

But there’s no one in here doing yoga; just Eddie by the treadmill. Staggered by the temperature, Richie looks, belatedly, to the piece of paper that’s tacked to the door. 

**A/C OUT** , it reads. **APOLOGIES MAINTENANCE HAS BEEN INFORMED**

It’s been enough to ward off the rest of his building’s gym-goers, apparently, but not one Edward Kaspbrak, who’s pressed a shaking hand to his forehead like he’s a Victorian woman with the vapors. Eddie glances back at him, seemingly unsurprised to see him, or–well, from the looks of him, he looks more like he’s focused on trying not to pass out. “You okay, man?” Richie manages, bewildered. “Are you, like–are you good?”

“Yeah!” Eddie calls, his voice a little strangled. “Yeah. Pretty good!”

Eddie doesn’t look pretty good. His shirt is soaked through with sweat–Richie hadn’t noticed because he’d been looking at his shorts. He’s white as a ghost, and as he reaches for his water bottle, his hand is shaking. He fumbles with it–his hands are probably slippery–and as he recovers, he lurches, and Richie stumbles forward to catch him by the arm, clumsily, just enough to right him. 

Eddie’s skin is hot under his touch, slick with sweat, and now that it’s clear that he’s not going to fall on his face, he wriggles free from his grip. “I’m _fine_ ,” he says, steadying himself with a white-knuckled grip on the arm of the treadmill instead. “I just need to drink some water.”

Richie watches him do so–particularly, the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows, the column of his throat, a little blotchy from the heat. It’s profoundly hot in here, actually– _Richie’s_ sweating, even, he can feel it at his temples, and he’s only been in here a few seconds. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Richie asks, as Eddie drinks, and drinks, and drinks. “I mean, feel free, but it’s hot in here. This is, like, inhumane.” 

Eddie _had_ been thirsty. It takes him an age to finish, and when he does, he wipes at his mouth and gives Richie an irritated look, like what he’d been doing ought to have been obvious. “I’m running.” 

“The AC is out,” Richie points out, stupidly. “There was a sign.”

“It’s not that bad,” Eddie says, a little half-heartedly. This doesn’t line up with what Richie’s learned about Eddie, over the course of several hours’ worth of breaks that he’s taken from his actual job, which is, to put it bluntly, _so_ much. He knows that his birthday is in September, and he knows that he likes dogs. He knows that he has a lot of opinions on the Marvel cinematic franchise, mostly bad, although he’s somehow seen every single one of them nonetheless. He knows that he’s a neat freak; he’s watched his kitchen cleaning routine. And most importantly, he knows that Eddie, for what must be ninety percent of his waking hours, is cognizant of his own mortality.

Half of his STORYTIME videos involve some medical episode or another. There’s an entire series devoted to what he can and can’t eat, and three videos devoted to his life as an asthmatic. As per his own admission, he can’t walk barefoot on the grass because he’s allergic to ants. _It’s not that bad_ , as a concept, doesn’t seem to exist in the frame of his vocabulary, at least within the context of things that might hurt him, or things that might make him pass out right there in front of Richie’s eyes, such as heat exhaustion. 

“It seems pretty bad,” Richie insists. He’s definitely sweating, now, and he’s unused to feeling like this, fussing over someone else. Which he isn’t doing, precisely. Sort of. He’s just trying to work this out. “Is this a, like, sweat out your toxins thing? Because I did hot yoga once, and I did get rid of some toxins, but I’m pretty sure it’s because I puked three times.”

Not a great joke, but he’s plagiarizing from Bill’s experience, and _that’s_ well within the Tozier comedic playbook, at least. “No!” Eddie screws up his face. “Gross. I just have to run, I missed it yesterday, you have to stick with it or you lose your form. What else am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, run outside? It’s nice out. I’m the last person to give, like, fitness coaching, but I can see the park from here.”

They can. Eddie turns his face to the glass windows, and the two of them watch the park just across the way from the front of the apartment complex, there in the distance, lush with greenery. Dotted with runners, even, brightly colored flashes of athletic wear, and as Eddie tracks one of them with his eyes, there’s an expression there that Richie can’t quite place. 

“I prefer the gym,” he says, finally, and looks back to the treadmill, Richie’s signal to go. He doesn’t look moments from death anymore–a little bit of color has returned to his face–and what the fuck is Richie supposed to know about how working out works, given how much he doesn’t do it. Maybe the water _had_ been the ticket. 

“Well, try not to die in here,” Richie says, already backing off. “Hot running! Maybe it’s the new thing.” He drops his voice to something approaching a movie trailer guy. “ _Remember how we made yoga worse? We did the same thing with jogging_.”

“I _like_ yoga,” Eddie calls, and Richie can still feel his sweat under his palm, which ought to be gross, but it isn’t, especially not now, while he’s thinking about Eddie doing yoga, and it’s _hot_ in here, like a sauna, and he needs to leave. With a weird, stupid sort of salute, Richie shoulders open the door and he’s gone, returned into the blessed hallway AC–a good thing, because he’d been about five seconds away from panting like a dog. 

***

Eddie does like yoga, as it turns out, and Richie watches him do it on YouTube for all of two minutes until he feels like a disgusting pervert and he has to click out of it. This isn’t the first time that’s happened–at two AM last week, he’d consciously made the decision to watch STRETCH WITH ME FOR RUNNING and then [ASMR] [ROLEPLAY] I AM YOUR DOCTOR AND YOU HAVE A HERNIATED DISC in succession, which had turned out to be a _poor_ decision, within the grand scheme of things, because watching this poor guy’s YouTube videos without telling him is bad enough; being _gross_ about his YouTube videos puts him within another realm entirely. 

He’s trying to be decent about this, is all. It’s all public stuff, obviously, but contrary to Stan, Page 6, and the court of public opinion ever since he’d cracked that joke about the swine flu epidemic back in ’09, he’s also occasionally somewhat cognizant of what the good thing to do is, and the good thing to do isn’t to pop a boner from his next door neighbor leaning in close to the camera and murmuring something stern about his lower lumbar. 

But after their encounter that morning, something’s stuck in Richie’s mind like a burr; a video that he’d seen there when he’d searched for Eddie’s handle initially, something about IS EDDIETV REAL? He wonders. There’s all sorts of things about the entertainment curtain that aren’t what they seem, behind the velvet curtain–god, Richie knows that well enough–but an Eddie who’s so concerned about his health like he seems online, so _vigilant_ , wouldn’t run his way into heatstroke, surely. 

So, a little guiltily, sprawled on his couch, he pulls up Google on his phone. 

_eddietv real_ , he types in, and when that doesn’t come up with anything more substantial than Eddie’s channel proper, he tries _eddietv rumors_ , and then, finally, _eddietv gossip_ , and that gets him somewhere. 

EDDIETV DISCUSSION THREAD PART 7, he reads, and his guilt intensifies. They’re past private stuff now. But it’s probably all bullshit, he tells himself. There’s been plenty written about Richie that isn’t true; there’s a particularly vehement contingent of bloggers who are convinced that he and Bev have a secret child. He’ll take this, he reminds himself, with a grain of salt, before scrolling down. 

**_olive24601 » Mon Apr 10, 2019 9:53 pm_ **

_i feel like something’s going on with him lately tbh. he’s talking about the gluten allergy but didn’t he say he cured that(??) somehow in October?_

**_ARRESTDAVIDDOBRIK » Mon Apr 10, 2019 11:00 pm_ **

_Did you see his stretching video all he does is thirst trap now lol, it’s sad. Hes 40._

**_wrongnumber » Mon Apr 10, 2019 11:34 pm_ **

_ >ARRESTDAVIDDOBRIK wrote: _

_ >>Did you see his stretching video all he does is thirst trap now lol, it’s sad. Hes 40. _

_he’s 40 and he’s hot lol?? of all the things to complain about who gaf_

**_kittengirl » Mon Apr 10, 2019 11:34 pm_ **

_ >olive24601 wrote: _

_ >>i feel like something’s going on with him lately tbh. he’s talking about the gluten allergy but >>didn’t he say he cured that(??) somehow in October? _

_I know we’re ~over the is he a character thing but it’s stuff like this that makes me wonder. He’s too inconsistent._

The thread, quickly, devolves into a discussion over _how_ Eddie might have cured his gluten allergy, albeit temporarily, until one person mentions his essential oils phase and the question spirals into a debate over multi-level-marketing. That’s both uninteresting and incomprehensible to Richie, and so he scrolls down further, until the word neighbor catches his attention like a slap in the face. 

**_whiskeytango » Weds Apr 12, 2019 11:00 pm_ **

_ >olive24601 wrote: _

_ >>This is how it is with this dude lol like zerooo consistency. Remember the neighbor he made >>that whole video about hating and then thre was like nothing mentioned about him ever >>again?? Same thing with that wife he supposedly had when he started posting _

_no the wife thing is real Im p sure someone found the divorce record online_

**icemancometh » Weds Apr 12, 2019 11:20 pm**

_ >olive24601 wrote: _

_ >>This is how it is with this dude lol like zerooo consistency. Remember the neighbor he made that whole video about hating and then thre was like nothing mentioned about him ever >>again?? Same thing with that wife he supposedly had when he started posting _

_He talked about the neighbor again in his latest Q &A. _

Richie pulls up Eddie’s youtube account in a new tab; to his great shame, as soon as he types in edd, the rest of it autopopulates, but he’ll have time to dwell on that shame later. For now, he clicks on the latest video, entitled LIFE UPDATE/Q&A. 

It’s Eddie sitting at the desk in his bedroom, not an unfamiliar sight, posted four days ago. It’s early in the morning, judging from how it looks outside, and Eddie hasn’t shaved yet, judging from the patchy beard that’s starting to grow in. 

There are timestamps in the description, and as Eddie launches into his LIFE UPDATE–it seems to mostly be about introducing wheatgrass into his diet and shaving a few seconds off of his mile, and if the two are correlated, fascinating stuff–Richie scrolls down to scan it. 

  * _~ 1. 3:26 BOOKS IM READING LATELY???_
  * _~ 2. 6:20 CATS OR DOGS??_
  * _~ 3. 11:21 THOUGHTS ON SURVIVOR SEASON 34??????_
  * _~ 4. 15:07 THE BACHELOR SUCKS??_
  * _~ 5. 17:47 COLLEGE ADVICE??_
  * _~ 6. 20:53 WHAT HAPPENED TO MY ASSHOLE NEIGHBOR???_



Dutifully, he mashes his thumb over 20:53. 

“– _and after I got kicked off the tennis team because the captain was an asshole I was like, fuck this, and then I graduated, and that was it, pretty much. Next up, uh–”_

Eddie squints at his phone again, and his face goes through a few quick changes. Surprise, guilt, sheepishness. 

“ _My neighbor! Oh. I forgot about all that, sorry. He’s sort of...I, uh. I think I got the wrong impression. Or, I mean. The singing was bad, obviously, but I don’t really want to kill him. He’s okay, actually.”_

“Shit,” Richie hisses as he fumbles with his phone. It drops from his hands and hits him right in the glasses with a _whap_ , and–the bridge of his nose smarting–he fumbles to hold it up again. 

“ _...so, he’s kind of funny, actually. We’re cool about the singing stuff.”_ Eddie pauses, mulls over his word choice. “ _We’re friends, now, I think,”_ he decides, with a little more firmness. 

Are they friends? Something in Richie’s chest twinges–guilt, maybe. Richie’s been perving on him from a distance, and so he knows him now, this representation of him on his screen, fairly intimately, he’s pretty sure, but he wouldn’t have called Richie a _friend_ if he were to be in Eddie’s shoes. Not from their scant handful of interactions. A friendly acquaintance, maybe; a guy he knows. He wonders, not for the first time, about Eddie’s life outside of the internet, about the routine that he’s become more or less cognizant of–the leaving at nine AM, the returning at seven-thirty PM in a suit, like clockwork, without fail. 

He wonders about his wife. As Eddie continues on to answer a question about how many vitamins he takes, he tabs back over to the gossip site he’d been looking at before, and–against his better judgement–reads some more. 

***

Richie learns more out about the state of Eddie’s social life soon enough–unwillingly. The next night, Richie comes in early from the bar with Stan and Bev. He’d gone out with the full intention of getting drunk enough to forget everything–but even if Stan’s his friend always, he’s his manager sometimes, and he’d probed at whether or not Richie had much of anything done on his script one too many times, until Richie had begged off early, feigning a stomachache. 

He winds up in his kitchen at around ten, diligently going through the motions of filling up a glass of water from the tap. He’s probably not going to be too hung over after this–he’s forty, which means that the odds are stacked against him, but he’s also got twenty (or so…) years of career experience in drinking quite a bit, and he’s learned by now how much of a difference a full glass or two before passing out is. Richie has the glass to his lips when he hears the thumping. 

It’s like someone’s gently rolling a bowling ball into his door, a little bit, or someone attempting a soft sort of body-check. There’s a silence, and for a second, Richie thinks that he’d imagined it, until he hears what sounds like a half-hearted effort at opening the door by way of scratching the keyhole out. 

“Fuck,” he hears, mumbled, more of a sigh than anything, and he sets the glass down. A familiar voice, he thinks with a frown– _Eddie’s_ voice, he’s pretty sure, and he’s willing enough to make that wager to go to unlock the door and pull it open, which turns out to be a mistake because as it turns out Eddie’s mostly relying on it to keep himself upright. 

Eddie grapples with him, catching him by the shoulders, and squints at him blearily. Richie stares down at him, bewildered. 

“Eddie?”

“Why’re you in my apartment?” Eddie slurs, and Richie realizes he’s drunk. _Drunk_ drunk, college-drunk, Richie can smell it on him, even if it isn’t cheap beer. Richie’s so startled by this turn of events that he releases him and Eddie slips past him, stumbling to a halt in the middle of Richie’s living room, hands outstretched a little for balance. Something visibly occurs to Eddie. “This is _your_ apartment,” he says slowly, inexplicably accusatory, but as he points at Richie, he wobbles a little bit. 

Richie catches him by the elbow, hastily. He’s dressed for work, mostly; it appears that he’s missing his jacket, and his tie is loosened, the first button or two undone. Unsure of what else to do–Richie’s usually the one in _Eddie’s_ position, so rarely does he get to play drunk babysitter–Richie steers him to his couch. 

Eddie collapses on it obligingly. Even if it’s not his apartment (as he’d pointed out, so astutely), he seems more or less willing to make his way at home, and he reaches down to fumble with one of his shoes half-heartedly, but apparently it’s more trouble than it’s worth, because he only manages to wrestle one of them off before abandoning his efforts and putting his feet up. Richie doesn’t give a shit–he’s fallen asleep with his shoes on in the _bed–_ but he’s also pretty sure that Eddie’s a shoes off inside kind of guy, upon punishment of death (just a guess) which means that he’s profoundly drunk, and also Richie ought to get him into his own apartment because that’s the decent thing to do. 

“Hey,” Richie says, a little loudly, crouching down by the end of the couch that his head is situated on. “Eddie. _Edward_. Where are your keys?”

“Where are my keys?” Eddie wonders, which isn’t an answer to his question, or helpful at all, really. Richie sighs. 

He’s not going to pat him down, he _refuses_ , and maybe it’s a good thing to leave him where he is now, lest he fall and his head on something whilst left to his own devices. Giving up on the key search, at least momentarily, Richie goes to retrieve the glass of water he’d poured and abandoned; when he returns with it, and takes a seat on the low-legged coffee table by the couch and pushes it into Eddie’s hands, Eddie looks into the glass with an look of great suspicion, like he thinks he might find visible poison floating in it. 

“Did you Brita this shit?”

“Do I _look_ like I own a Brita?” Eddie does him the decency of not answering that particular question, although he does peer up at him, like he’s evaluating him. “It’s from the tap.”

It’s the wrong answer. “Nooooo,” Eddie moans, devastated, as he lets his head fall back against the pillow. 

“It’s what you get,” Richie says idly. “It’s good for you. It’ll, like, boost your immune system. All that bacteria. I mean, personally speaking, I _love_ my water with a little bit of texture, anyway–”

Eddie makes a face, and a half-hearted effort to set the glass next to him on the table. Richie gives him something of an assist lest he botch the landing, although he leaves it within reach. 

Eddie shuts his eyes. “I’m so drunk,” he mumbles. 

“I can see that.”

“I don’t drink like this,” Eddie continues on, listlessly, like Richie hadn’t said anything. “Not often. I had to. But I shouldn’t.”

“I’ve never been anyone’s voice of reason before,” Richie informs him, watching as Eddie reaches up to pat at his own face, like he’s trying to sober himself up. “And guess what? It’s just about as fun as it looks.”

The implication being that this isn’t fun, obviously, but it’s not _not_ fun. Richie’s a little bit drunk. Not _so_ drunk, not _Eddie_ drunk, but buzzed enough to keep himself from thinking too hard on how to solve this more neatly than he is now. 

“I don’t usually go to this stuff,” Eddie explains, slow and slurred. “We had to do the wine and dine thing–Brooks n’me are the only ones without, like, wives, so. No one waiting up for us. I don’t usually go to anything.”

When he talks drunk, Richie notes, he talks out of one side of his mouth. “Why not?” he asks, scratching at his chin. 

“I can’t.” It’s the only explanation Richie gets, short and sweet, before Eddie’s attention wanders, and he leans up, propping himself up on an elbow so that he can examine Richie a little more closely. “Hey. I _know_ you,” Eddie says, and Richie stares back, caught in his gaze. “I saw your special.” Another pause, for an amendement. “I saw your special… _sssssss_ . I think you’re funny. I do, Richie. You have to–you _can_ be funny, I mean it.”

It’s delivered earnestly enough so that Richie has to look away, awkwardly, laid bare by something in the way that Eddie says it. _You can be funny_ , Eddie says, and that’s true, maybe, but–easier to tell other people’s jokes. Safer, he wants to say. Easier to buy something from the store than to cook from scratch, and he _knows_ this, he’s learned it, over the course of the last few decades of his life. It’s why it’s a fool’s errand to write this script–it’s why he’s spent the last few weeks dicking around rather than _trying_ , lest he swing and miss, even if Stan stuck his neck out to give him this, some space to try to do this, some time away from the entertainment machine. 

“Do you think we’re friends?” Richie ventures, after a pause, before he can’t say it. Still propped up on an elbow, Eddie regards him, and Richie wonders–a little dizzily, because god, he’s drunk too, remember–if he’s showed his hand with this, if he can sense that Richie’s probing at a vulnerability here, a hushed confession into a video camera from Eddie that Richie isn’t supposed to know about. 

“Don’t be such a little bitch,” Eddie says instead, and Richie’s so startled that he laughs. 

“Hey!”

“Do you want to be friends?” Eddie echoes–sort of–with a half smile, and Richie, stupidly, returns it. 

“Do _you_?” he asks. 

Eddie pauses, like he’s considering it. “Maybe we could,” he ventures. “Be friends.”

“Alright, Eddie,” Richie says. Eddie’s drunk–he’s not in any position to be making any sort of decisions, and Richie won’t hold him to anything he says, obviously, but he hopes that he’ll remember this, a little. 

“Let’s shake on it. With our hands,” Eddie says, and before Richie can stop him, he seizes Richie’s one hand with both of his own and gives it a shake. He’s got a strong grip; his hands are warm, too, or maybe that’s just Richie’s shitty circulation. “Your hands are so big,” Eddie notes, morosely. “I hate my little hands.”

“No, they’re good!” Richie hastens to reassure him, cupping his hands with his own now, which has transformed this handshake from something a little bit strange into something profoundly ridiculous. He gives his knuckles a reassuring rub, to see if that makes it any better, but it mostly makes it a bit weirder. “They’re great little hands, dude.”

Eddie eyes him with a touch of resentment. “You’re supposed to say they’re not little.” 

“God, I love your fucking huge hands,” Richie launches into, seamlessly and seriously. “They’re gigantic. The biggest hands I’ve ever seen. Did you grow them yourself, or did you, y’know, get some work done–”

“That makes me sound like a freak,” Eddie protests, withdrawing from Richie’s touch, finally. He folds them on his chest, lacing his fingers together, and Richie considers them, before his gaze flicks back up to Eddie’s face. 

“Who were you out with?” he asks, after a companionable silence. 

“Big new account. For my _job_.” Eddie rolls his eyes. “I ought to quit.” He peers up at the ceiling, and when he continues on, it’s quietly. “I want to quit.”

“Then quit?” 

“I can’t, Richie. It’s irresponsible.”

“Oh, okay,” Richie says, skeptical. He’s got to be making some money from YouTube. How much do people make, from YouTube? He has no idea–comedy’s pretty simple, comparatively. Stand up on stage, tell funny jokes, people laugh, rinse and repeat. But Eddie’s tastes, Richie is pretty sure–judging by the Escalade he’s seen him pull into the parking garage in–run expensive, so maybe YouTube’s not enough to keep him in Gucci loafers. 

“You wouldn’t understand. It’s not safe,” Eddie murmurs, not reproachful, but–resigned, maybe. Quiet again, either way. Richie gets the sense that he’s starting to drift off. 

“Hey,” Richie says, reaching for the glass of water that Eddie had abandoned. “C’mon, you’ve gotta drink this.”

When Richie holds it up to his mouth, Eddie tilts his head obligingly, reaching up with a hand to catch Richie by the wrist to steady him as he drinks rather than grasp the glass itself. It’s quiet and intimate. Richie can hear him swallow; he can see how his throat works, feel how his grip on his wrist tightens minutely as Richie tips the glass and tips it some more as he goes. 

Eddie finishes off most of it. Richie pulls the glass back and sets it on the table and ignores the thrumming under his skin, a crackle like electricity, how the heat from Eddie’s hand lingers white-hot under the skin of his wrist.

Distance, suddenly, feels like it’s particularly important. Richie gets up to retrieve the throw blanket piled on his chair and tosses it at Eddie from what feels like a safe proximity. It lands mostly on his face, to Eddie’s vocal dismay, but after some grappling with it he manages to get underneath it more or less so Richie counts that as a win. 

Richie shuts the lights off, first one, and then the other, leaving the living room dark. He’s just turning to go when he hears Eddie again, voice quiet and thick with sleep. 

“I like you, Richie,” Eddie mumbles, stifling a yawn. Richie looks back at him, mostly a shape there in the dark, huddled on the couch. A car drives by outside, and its headlights splash across Eddie’s face as it goes. He’d been watching him but he shuts his eyes at the burst of light, throwing an arm across his face–where he leaves it, his nose tucked into the crook of his elbow, and when he continues on, his voice is a little bit muffled. “I do. Do you like me?”

“Yeah,” Richie says, hoarsely, his hand opening and closing helplessly, grasping for something that isn’t there. Eddie is drunk, he tells himself. “Go to sleep. Bathroom’s down the hall, don’t puke on the rug.”

If that earns him a face, he doesn’t see it, because he’s already turned to head down the hallway. Richie goes into his room and shuts the door. He strips down for bed, down to his boxers, puts his clothes from the day where they belong, which is flung across the room to rest crumpled on a chair until he remembers he ought to do laundry. He goes and brushes his teeth, and drinks the glass of water he’d meant to drink himself before Eddie had broken into his apartment. He turns off the light and climbs into bed, and gets under the covers. 

He lies awake. 

Richie hasn’t dated. Not _really_ . Circumstantially, it’s complicated; easier to fuck _Josh, 32_ on Grindr than it is to explain to an audience of thirty year old ex frat brothers that he talks about pussy a whole lot more than he actually cares to become acquainted with it. He’d tried the boyfriend thing once or twice, the organic way, caring about someone and getting to know him until a toothbrush appeared in the bathroom at his place, but in Richie’s experience it ends, mostly, in tears. Or a fight. A buyout, once, and an NDA, which Stan hadn’t been too pleased about. 

And Eddie had a wife, once, or so Richie had read. Her name was Myra. They’d gotten divorced after ten _years_ , which is like, past knee-deep, _waist_ -deep in heterosexuality shit. Richie hadn’t been able to find anything on why they’d gotten divorced, or what she’d looked like, apart from a single out-of-focus photo on a locked down Facebook profile, which is probably for the best, because it’s none of his business. 

But _I like you, Richie_ , Eddie had said. He might say it low and husky, not mumbled, half asleep, were they in different circumstances, Richie’s traitorous mind points out to him, and _fuck_ , he’s tipsy enough that it occurs to him that he might as well get this over with. Resigned, Richie shuts his eyes, snaking a hand down to slip a hand underneath his boxers; he’s half-hard, and he doesn’t care to wonder how long that situation’s been going on. 

_I do_ , imagined-Eddie says in his head, and maybe he’d straddle his lap, maybe in the gym shorts Richie had seen him on the treadmill in, loose on his hips on top of a tight layer of black Spandex shorts. Richie makes a loose fist and grinds up into his palm, already slick with precome, lazily as he pictures reaching up to run his hands over Eddie’s thighs, dipping his fingers underneath the Spandex to find the muscle there underneath. 

By the time he comes, biting his lip, he’s thinking about Eddie with his face half tucked against the curve of his jaw, his breath coming in pants as he works himself like Richie is now, as Eddie asks him, coyly, like he never would in person– _do you like me_?

He’s left with come in his hand and a wave of shame that hits him like a sledgehammer. This, he’s pretty sure, is the definition of gross pervert–jerking it to his drunk neighbor, asleep on the couch in the other room. His _straight_ neighbor, he’s pretty sure, who he’s already creeped on plenty, far beyond the bounds of what’s reasonable, what’s right. 

Richie gets up and washes his hands, scrubbing them until they smart. Then he goes to sleep. 

***

Eddie’s gone in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on twitter at @foxglovves!


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